SketchParty TV is a game that essentially allows a group of people to play a version of Draw Something on a big screen in a party setting, usually with between four and six players. The AirPlay component works by allowing AirPlay Mirroring to turn your Apple TV-connected television or display into the easel for the game. A player gets the word they’re supposed to draw on their iPhone or iPad, and as they draw on the screen, that image appears (without the clue words) on the TV, allowing others to join in and guess.

The app earned high praise from tech bloggers including Federico Viticci and Jim Dalrymple of the Loop nearer to its original launch back in July last year, but overall the response from the general public has been more muted. SketchParty TV’s Braun explained in an interview that to date, SketchParty TV has seen only around 5,000 total downloads, which he says still has probably put the game in front of between 20,000 and 30,000 people, given that it’s meant to be used in a group setting.

Those “aren’t breathtaking numbers,” admits Braun, but the reviews have been positive and this seems to be more an issue of consumer education and getting the feature out there than any limitation of the AirPlay tech itself, Braun suggests.

“Apple has a lot of technology in their platform to encourage developers to support, and AirPlay Mirroring is a smaller piece of the equation than something like, say, iCloud,” he explained. “There’s also a consumer education component involved – right now it seems to be up to the savvy to disseminate the wonders of AirPlay to their friends by word of mouth. Or by showing off games like SketchParty TV.”

Others like Real Racing have embraced the two-screen Mirroring experience, but even the support of a major publisher like EA hasn’t pushed it into the spotlight, and Apple isn’t exactly crowing about the feature either. They advertised that AirPlay Mirroring made it possible to see the same thing on your TV as you’re watching on the iPhone or iPad, but there’s been no formal campaign to promote the fact that gamers can get a true, Wii U style dual-screen gaming experience from current apps with the tools available now.

“It’s been surprising to me that there are many people who have an Apple TV and an iOS device and are aware of the ability to send a video stream over AirPlay, or mirror the device display, but not of the ability to do second-screen to the television and show different content on each,” Braun said about the conspicuous absence of hype around the feature. “Personally, I’d love for Apple to give more love to the Apple TV – whether that means improvements to the current offering or some bold new direction like an actual HDTV set.”

Rumors still prevail that Apple is planning its own HDTV set, despite the fact that this has been rumored for years now. But if it does come true, that would provide a big reason for Apple to push more of its features. The other big question mark that remains centers around whether Apple might just open the Apple TV platform to third-party apps, which might minimize, though not eliminate, the benefits of having an AirPlay-connected game.

Braun says that the addressable market is large for this type of experience, ranging between 10 to 12 million by his calculations, and with plenty of growth potential thanks to the more than 300 million strong iOS user pool. It’s a bigger potential market than that represented by the current combined sales of all major home gaming consoles, in fact, with the provision that Apple needs to blanket more of those with the AirPlay component. One way or another, that’s a market that won’t go ignored for long.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Messaging app Line, which recently announced it has passed 150 million users, has withdrawn a function from its iOS app that allowed users to gift paid-for stickers to each other by paying for them with a virtual currency. The change, spotted earlier by The Next Web, was explained by the company in a blog post today, in which it wrote: “As of 15:00 today, May 10, 2013, we regret to announce that we will be withdrawing the function to send purchased stickers as gifts to friends on the iPhone version of LINE.”

Line did not go into detail as to why it is withdrawing the paid-for gifting function, saying only that Apple asked it to remove this feature. It is also removing purchases of the virtual currency used for sticker gifting. The change only affects Line’s iOS app. Users can still buy stickers for their own use, or gift free stickers.

Line said:

We received a request directly from Apple who operates the AppStore, that this sticker gifting function will have to be withdrawn from the app, and we do apologize for the disappointment this may cause to all of you who are having fun sending stickers as gifts to your friends.

The problem with Line’s process here appears to be that it was bypassing Apple’s in-app payment rules — i.e. circumventing the sanctioned in-app payment process via use of a virtual currency. That’s a pretty clear no-no, although some other apps, such as Skype or Spotify, get round this issue by allowing users to buy services outside the app and then make use of their credits within the app.

It’s unclear whether Line allowed users to buy virtual currency via its web platform and then redeem those credits in-app, which may be one workaround. Another would be for Line to let users gift stickers by making direct in-app payments — which would not cut Apple out of the transaction.

We’ve reached out to Line with questions and will update this story with any response. Line noted on its blog that free sticker gifting can continue within the iOS app, and Line users are also able to buy stickers for their own use (via an in-app purchase) — so it’s clearly the virtual currency that’s the culprit here. Line added that iPhone users will still be able to receive stickers gifted to them by Android users. Any iOS app users with remaining Line coins will be able to gift stickers to use them up.

Line, which is now operated by Line Corporation, after a corporate name change last month, reported its first set of financial results earlier this week, announcing some $58.9 million in revenues for its Q1 – around 30% of which, or some $17.67 million, came from sticker purchases. The majority of Line’s revenues (around 50%) come from game in-app purchases.

Line does not break out its sticker revenues further so it’s unclear how large an impact the iOS change will have. However if paid-for sticker gifting is a significant revenue stream the company could deploy an alternative payment mechanism to keep offering the feature on iOS.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’ve been using OpenTable to reserve tables at your favorite restaurants, the latest update for Android will help you discover new places to eat a little better and keep track of everything you have going on. It also got some of that Holo design lovin’.

The company announced the Android update today on its blog, noting a complete overhaul of its maps integration, fully leveraging Google Maps v2. The other major feature, that the company notes was a popular community request, is the ability to add a reservation directly to your Google Calendar. This feature is available for those using Android 4.0+. The plus here is that you can utilize Google Calendar to send out invites to your dinner, which is the best way to get those last reminders in. It’s pretty shocking that this hasn’t been available until now.

The new maps integration cuts down on clutter, OpenTable says, and you can now use the feature to explore areas away from where you are currently, which was a bit of an odd restraint in the previous version of the app.

Navigation is now much easier, allowing you to go back to the previous page or jump to your favorites, current reservations or a map view. The profile pages themselves got a facelift too, showing the overall rating for a restaurant immediately:

Some other quick tweaks include speedier menu and review loading and the ability to edit your reservation’s date, time and party size right on the restaurant page, rather than having to jump around. The company promises more Android-specific updates moving forward, after updating its iOS app last month to include a cool feature, Foodspotting dishes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Rumors have been circulating that Google Glass may have a feature that lets you wink to take a picture. Within the kernel source code, developers have discovered that the feature does exist deep in the code, but for most users of Google Glass, this feature is not an option on the front-end.

However, TechCrunch has confirmed with multiple sources, who wish to remain anonymous for obvious reasons, that the wink feature is indeed real and being used by a small number of engineers who were seeded with the original developer units of Google Glass. In other words, those who are developing for Glass as a part of the second wave of units (#ifihadglass) are not privy to the feature, as far as we know.

In fact, one source told us that Google actually came to a location to physically install an updated version of the software to unlock this feature, which appears in settings. Developers have already started building applications that employ the wink feature, but Google can also offer the command on an OS level.

Here’s how it works: At any time while Google Glass is on your head and turned on, the user may perform an extended wink (much like the one Lucille Bluth does repeatedly in Arrested Development*) to snap a picture instantly.

A second source explained to us that Glass actually trains itself to recognize your wink. In other words, you calibrate the tool so that Glass recognizes what your particular “wink” looks like. Without calibrating the length of a purposeful, command-giving wink, Glass would pick up each and every blink as a photo op. Obviously.

Multiple sources confirmed that the wink feature is available as an option in settings, once Google has updated the unit with the proper version of the software. The kernel also confirms this, as the code has options for “ENABLED” and “DISABLED” as well as information on “CALIBRATION,” just like one of our sources mentioned.

Sensors

Google has not clarified the exact number or names of the sensors within Google Glass, though many believe that there is both an infrared sensor on the inner portion of the headset, as well as a proximity sensor baked inside. The proximity sensor is there to handle the “waking” and “sleeping” states of your device, according to Google’s official statement.

Just like a smartphone, Google Glass will go to sleep when you put it down, halting incoming calls and messages and turning off the display (though keeping the camera button alert in case there’s a Kodak moment afoot). When you pick it up and place it on your head, it instantly wakes back up and starts receiving notifications, etc.

The infrared sensor, on the other hand, is far more mysterious. Google hasn’t really spoken up about it much, though sources around the web tend to believe that the unidentified little sensor on the inner rim of the headset is indeed an infrared camera. This would allow Glass to track eye movements to some degree. As our sources have clearly confirmed, the IR camera can at the very least detect a blink and a wink, and the possibilities beyond that are deep and wide. Just take a look at these Google patents.

Patents

The first is a patent that names Adrian Wong, Google Glass engineer, Ryan Geiss, a senior software engineer at Google, and Hayes Raffie, an interactions researcher on the Special Projects team at Google.

The title? “Unlocking a screen using eye tracking information”.

The patent broadly describes a method by which a user could unlock a display (most often referenced as a Heads-up-display on a wearable computing device) through various forms of eye-tracking. Sure, unlocking a device and snapping a picture are different, and so is the method by which this patent describes unlocking and our information concerning the Google Glass wink command for pictures.

However, be well aware that there are 26 mentions of the term infrared, and more than 100 mentions of the term HMD (head-mounted display). There also seems to be a passage within the patent that confirms the ability to decipher blinks (if only to disregard them, in this instance, but still).

To unlock a screen coupled to the HMD after a period of inactivity that may have caused the screen to be locked, a processor coupled to the wearable computing system may generate a display of a moving object and detect through an eye tracking system if an eye of the wearer may be tracking the moving object. The processor may determine that a path associated with the movement of the eye of the wearer matches or substantially matches a path of the moving object and may unlock the display. The path of the moving object may be randomly generated and may be different every time the wearer attempts to unlock the screen. Tracking a slowly moving object may reduce a probability of eye blinks, or rapid eye movements (i.e., saccades) disrupting the eye tracking system. The processor may generate the display of the moving object such that a speed associated with motion of the moving object on the HMD may be less than a predetermined threshold speed. Onset of rapid eye pupil movements may occur if a speed of a moving object tracked by the eye of the wearer is equal to or greater than the predetermined threshold speed. Alternatively, the speed associated with the moving object may be independent of correlation to eye blinks or rapid eye movements. The speed associated with the motion of the moving object may change, i.e., the moving object may accelerate or decelerate. The processor may track the eye movement of the eye of the wearer to detect if the eye movement may indicate that the eye movement may be correlated with changes in the speed associated with the motion of the moving object and may unlock the screen accordingly.

Now, take a look at this patent.

Though it doesn’t go into any detail on eye-tracking, it does reaffirm Google’s intentions to use infrared sensors within their head-mounted, wearable computing devices. A year later, that device is called Google Glass.

Next Steps

Whether Google intends to roll out this feature more broadly is still unknown.

Since Google is allowing a small number of developers to use “wink,” the company is clearly staying true to its tradition of beta testing services thoroughly before a huge roll out. In fact, anyone wearing Glass right now is undoubtedly a beta tester of the whole operation.

But wink will almost certainly raise questions of privacy. If you feel like a simple, spoken “Ok glass, take a picture” is already too much of an invasion of your privacy, imagine how you’ll feel when some Glasshole can take your picture without you ever being the wiser.

On the other hand, the wink also brings up all kinds of interesting use-cases, like the ability to determine when someone is having a seizure, for instance. People were afraid of the geolocation, and CCTV, and online banking, too, at one point in the past. And look how that turned out.

It’s too soon to tell whether Glass will fly or die, but it can sure as hell wink.

*Who’s excited for May 26?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Instagram today announced a new way for users to tag their friends and other accounts, along with “Photos of You,” a new section of the profile that displays all the photos a user or brand has been tagged in.

The feature is similar to Facebook’s own photo tagging, where users can tap an area of a photo to add a person’s name. The person will be alerted and have the option to approve the photo before it goes on their profile. Previously, users could mention other users in the caption of their photos, but there was no way to clearly indicate who was in a photo and where. There also wasn’t a way to quickly access all the photos users themselves were in.

One difference from Facebook is that users can easily tag brand accounts. Facebook allows tagging of pages from desktop but never brought the feature to mobile, a missed opportunity since so many photos are uploaded from mobile devices. Instagram, with hashtags and now photo tagging, is closer to Twitter in being a platform for connecting with public figures, brands and people that users don’t know in person. Facebook on the other hand has struggled on this front in large part because there isn’t an easy way to tag non-friends or to notify those brands and public figures that they’ve been mentioned. Instagram’s all-private or all-public approach to privacy, like Twitter has, means it doesn’t have to deal with the same subtleties that Facebook does when it comes to these settings.

At the same time, the change today helps Instagram serve as a more complete social profile for people and brands, not unlike their profiles and pages on Facebook. Users can access photos of themselves or another account by tapping the button on the profile page, as seen below. This is available in the lastest iOS and Android versions of the app, though not on the web profile yet.

It’s worth noting that brands may have to begin putting time toward approving photo tags in order to manage their presence on the platform. Facebook says all users will have until May 16th to test the feature before their “Photos of You” section is visible to others.

Facebook today announced “Trusted Contacts,” an update to its “Trusted Friends” security feature that sends access codes to a few of a user’s close friends in order to help the person regain access to their account when needed.

Users will now be able to designate their Trusted Contacts in advance and change them if necessary through the Security Settings dashboard. Previously, users only encountered this feature when they were having trouble with their account. This meant that many users were unfamiliar with it. By making Trusted Contacts part of a user’s main settings, more people might understand what it is before they have a problem — or before they are called upon as a Trusted Contact themselves. This will help users be able to use the feature more effectively.

Facebook says it has also improved the flow for people who are their friend’s Trusted Contacts, giving them more information throughout the process of helping someone get back into the account. They’ll also be notified when they are selected, another way to help people understand the feature in advance. Some users are often wary of unfamiliar Facebook features, suspecting they might be part of a scam. We’ve heard from users who didn’t initially trust Facebook’s Offers or Gifts products because they thought they were third-party spam. Something like Trusted Friends with access codes to let another user log into their account might have seemed too suspicious to some. The changes today could help avoid that.

Starting today, users can set up their Trusted Contacts by visiting their Security Settings and choosing three to five friends to help them when they need it. Facebook recommends choosing friends that a user would be comfortable giving a spare key to their house. It’s also important to choose people that can be reached outside of Facebook messages, since a locked out user won’t be able to contact them this way.

When a user is unable to log into their account and can’t use the email password recovery system, they can then have an access code sent to these Trusted Contacts, who then share the code with them in person, on the phone or another trusted means of communication. Facebook warns against using email, chat or text, which can be easier for someone trying to impersonate a user and take over their account. When the user gets the access codes from three different friends, they can then put these into Facebook and recover their account.

Facebook says it offers this instead of giving users long forms to fill out or asking security questions like “What street did you grow up on?” which users often forget or which could be easily known by someone besides the user.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook plans to announce its 2013 first quarter earnings tomorrow after the stock market closes.

Analysts expect earnings of 13 cents per share on revenue of $1.44 billion during the period of Jan. 1 to March 31. In Q4 2012, which included the holiday season, Facebook had earnings of 17 cents per share on revenue of $1.585 billion.

Here we’ll review the changes Facebook made in the first quarter across each of its areas of monetization.

Ads

Last year advertising made up 84 percent of Facebook’s overall revenue. In the first quarter of this year, the social network introduced new targeting capabilities and made a number of adjustments to the look and performance of its ads. The company also continued to ramp up the amount of ads in News Feed and on mobile, adding a three-in-one “Pages You May Like” unit and a new type of Page-Like ads to the mobile feed.

Partnerships with data vendors Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom and BlueKai opened up the opportunities for advertisers to reach new audiences based on third-party data, such as offline purchase behavior. This feature was in limited beta during Q1, but rolled out more widely as “partner categories” earlier this month.

Lookalike Audiences, which help advertisers target users similar to those in their Custom Audience databases, was another exciting new beta feature for advertisers last quarter. Facebook launched it globally in March.

A tool that was available for most advertisers throughout the quarter was conversion tracking. This allows advertisers to measure and optimize their ads leading off-Facebook. It’s particularly important to direct response advertisers and app developers.

Other improvements for DR advertisers were an increase in the size of link previews in News Feed and a redesign for mobile and desktop, which could make ads larger, more visual and even more effective. Facebook also launched a small test to introduce Facebook Exchange Ads in the desktop feed just before Q1 ended.

Tests of the “Promote Page” button, which rolled out globally today, might have started to have in impact on SMB advertising last quarter.

Game Payments 

Developer fees from in-game purchases make up the vast majority of Facebook’s payments revenue. In Q4 2012, only $5 million of its $256 million in payments revenue was from sources besides games.

Facebook announced last quarter that more than 250 million people play games on Facebook each month. The company also said it has seen an increase in users who spend money in Facebook games monthly.

Facebook did a number of things in Q1 to optimize its channels for game discovery and promotion. It tweaked the recommendations bar on canvas games to increase installs 5x over the last several months, improve the bookmarks bar menu 17 percent, notifications 15 percent, and App Center 30 percent. The company also promoted games in a homepage banner earlier this year and started running new News Feed stories about the games a user’s friends play.

However, Zynga, which has made up a large portion of Facebook’s payments revenue in the past has seen drop-off in revenue as players shift to mobile. That could have an impact on Facebook as well, though the social network has been seeking to diversify its platform with international developers and a better range in game genres.

Gifts

Facebook says that it expects Gifts to continue to grow slowly, but believes it could be a big business over time. For now, the company is working to get the user experience right. It is for the most part limited to the U.S., though at the start of April, Facebook began letting international users buy gifts for their friends in the U.S. That happened after Q1 had ended so it wouldn’t have an effect on revenue.

At the end of January, the social network introduced Facebook Card, a resusable gift card that can be loaded with balances for different retailers when a user’s friends buy them gifts through Facebook. It launched with very few partners, Jamba Juice, Olive Garden, Sephora and Target. Since then, Facebook has added Walgreens, Burger King, Outback Steakhouse and Staples, but awareness of Facebook Card still seems very low.

Facebook has expanded its overall Gifts inventory significantly and added many more options at lower price points. The company ran a promotion to give users $4 off a gift of $5 or more. This enabled users to send users to, for example, send a $5 Starbucks gift card for only $1. The social network also heavily promoted Gifts around Valentine’s Day, created a new dashboard with a user’s purchase history and prompts to buy more gifts for friends, as well as began inserting Gift calls to action within News Feed next to stories about friends with good news.

User Promoted Posts

Another small revenue stream is user Promoted Posts, which enable users to pay to get their personal posts to the top of their friends’ News Feeds. Facebook said this feature made up the majority of its $5 million non-game payments revenue in Q4 2012.

This February, Facebook expanded the feature to allow users to promote posts their friends made.

Paid Messages

At the end of 2012, Facebook announced a small test that will allow some users to pay to send direct messages to another user’s inbox rather than their “other” folder. This started as a very limited test in the U.S., but has expanded to the U.K. now as well.

Most messages cost $1 to send to a user’s inbox, but for some celebrities and popular figures, Facebook is testing higher price points, up to even $100 to message CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Back in 2010, Google launched Instant Preview to provide users with a quick way to get a graphic preview of a webpage before you click on the actual link. Now, as first spotted by Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System blog, it looks like Google is thinking about removing this feature and replacing it with a new drop-down menu.

Instant Preview is probably not a huge hit, given that Google wouldn’t consider removing it if it were a popular feature. It did hide a bit of useful functionality besides the previews, however. Opening these Instant Previews allowed you to also find similar pages and access the Google+ Share feature. In addition, it was also the only way to find Google’s cached version of a given page, too.

All of these features are still there in this new version, but they are now accessible through a drop-down menu right next to the main link.

It’s not clear if this is just a test, or if Google is indeed fully removing this feature and replacing it with the new drop-down menu. We have contacted Google about this change and will update this post once we learn more.

Here is what this looks like for TechCrunch (“Similar,” for some reason, only appears for a subset of results):

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There are very few platforms that have are something that you use on a daily basis, let alone on a minute by minute basis. Team communication platform service, Convo, is one of those for us at TechCrunch.

Today, the company has released an update for its essential iOS app, something that we use here quite often to communicate about everything you can think of. Since using the service, our team has generated over 100,000 interactions, averaging 1,200 of them a day, with 95% of our team present on the platform on those days. Its desktop version is completely in real-time, acting like a threaded IRC chat.

The service overall isn’t without its faults, but it’s difficult to build team and enterprise software that can make everyone happy. One of the top complaints that we had was about its iOS app, which was lacking proper iPhone 5 and retina support, along with some general usability issues. Today’s app udpate is all about speed, commenting and a slicker design that will help you get through all of the threaded discussions your team is having since you checked in last.

The feed

This is the most important part of Convo, especially when you’re on the go. In today’s update, you’re able to scan and refresh the main feed quickly, and when you tap on the comments for any given thread, they slide over from the right. This is a huge improvement from the previous version, which loaded the thread into a new page:

That update alone will save time, as you can jump back and forth between threads that you’re participating in and make decisions on whether to get involved in one quicker. Additionally, you’ll be able to “Like” things, which is a passive way of saying that you’ve seen something or agree with something, depending on how your team uses it.

Images are also clearer thanks to the retina support and complete overhaul of how they’re displayed. Depending on how you use the service, images could play a huge role in the conversation that you’re having. If you’re having a conversation about a piece of artwork for your app, seeing images at the highest resolution possible are the only way that you’ll be able to make a decision on whether to use them or feedback that you might have for your designer.

Cleanup and sharing

In addition to the feed overhaul, Convo has been cleaned up and designed from scratch for iOS. One of the issues that we had was how the app acted in low or no connectivity situations. For example, if you were to enter in a long comment but have no connection, your comment would be lost. It was a maddening user experience that we complained about, and the Convo team was clearly receptive to fixing our pain.

The other feature that made its way into this update is a bookmarklet that will let you drop links into Convo right from Safari. This is a trick that a few other apps have been using for a while, but given that we do what we do here at TechCrunch, sharing links is essential. This is another one of those things that we complained heavily about, so it’s nice to see the feature.

Search has also gotten an upgrade, which is important to do on the fly when you’re trying to go back and find a conversation that might have taken place hours, or even days ago.

As I mentioned, Convo isn’t without its faults, especially on the web where it still uses Flash, but for $9/seat monthly, you really can’t go wrong. Competing services like Salesforce’s Chatter and Microsoft’s Yammer lack the real-time aspects of Convo’s desktop and web apps, and with this iOS update, I suspect that we’ll see our mobile interaction increase as well. We were able to get our entire team onto the platform really fast, and that’s rare when you have a team that has numbers over, say three.

As you can see from the chart below, the onboarding process was pretty quick and luckily required minimal training:

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning and documentarian Alex Winter will be at TechCrunch Disrupt NY next week, joining our truly badass lineup to talk about their upcoming Napster documentary DOWNLOADED.

Buy Disrupt tickets here!

Napster’s emergence was the first time the masses were faced with the power of peer-to-peer file sharing and the Internet. There wasn’t a college campus that didn’t Napster its way through party soundtracks in the early aughts. And the fact that a woman is still involved in a multi-million-dollar lawsuit for downloading just 26 songs is testament to the fact that we still don’t understand how to harness that power.

Not only will we host a special pre-release screening of the film at Manhattan Center after the conference on Tuesday, April 30th, but we’ll be spending some time that afternoon chatting up Fanning and Winter. They will obviously talk about DOWNLOADED, why Napster failed and the state of the music industry in the digital era.

And we suspect Fanning will keep you posted on the state of his latest startup, Airtime, which was in pivot mode the last time we checked.

Fun fact: The name Napster came from a childhood nickname for Fanning’s curly (nappy) hair. The more you know.

Buy Disrupt tickets here!

DOWNLOADED trailer below.

Shawn Fanning
CEO & Co-Founder, Airtime

Shawn Fanning created Napster in 1998 while attending Northeastern University.

He is currently the GM of Rupture at Electronic Arts.

Fanning has since founded SNOCAP, a B2B Music Distributor, in 2002, and Rupture, an MMORPG social network in 2006. Both companies were sold in 2008 – SNOCAP to imeem, and Rupture to Electronic Arts.

Alex Winter

Alex began his career as a child actor, with starring roles on Broadway and in feature films, including the immensely popular BILL AND TED franchise and Warner Bros. THE LOST BOYS.

After attending NYU film School, Alex co-wrote, co-directed and starred in the hit MTV comedy series THE IDIOT BOX, following by his feature debut FREAKED, released by Twentieth Century Fox. Subsequent feature films include FEVER, a psychological thriller that Alex wrote and directed. Praised by AO Scott in the New York Times as ‘Pure Hitchcockian panic,’ FEVER was an Official Selection at Cannes and other festivals worldwide. For TV, Alex produced and directed two record-breaking, live-action BEN 10 movies for Cartoon Network, garnering an Emmy nomination for best Visual Effects. Currently, Alex is producing and directing DOWNLOADED, a feature documentary about the Digital revolution, for VH1 Rock Docs. Interview subjects include Napster co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning, as well as numerous musicians and industry executives. DOWNLOADED is due for theatrical and TV release in 2013.

Alongside his feature projects, Alex maintains a busy career as a director, screenwriter and actor.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch